Quest for Dark Matter a matter of Faith!
Imagine the minds of physicists who spend their time preoccupied with the question of time itself stretching all the way back to the birth of the universe.
Now picture the scene in the deep underground science facility in Boulby, Northern England, the quietest place in the universe to study dark matter, at 1.1 kilometers beneath the surface set in a huge network of roadways and caverns, with a 1 000 kilometers of tunnel evacuated since the beginning of mining operations in 1968.
The Boulby science facility is just one of a handful of its kind worldwide, but it is unique in that its salt and potash seams are the remains of an evaporated ancient sea.
This quietness is not only the absence of noise, but protection from the influence of cosmic rays and radiation that bombard the earth’s surface.
It is called dark matter because it does not reflect light and is therefore invisible,also, there is no electro-magnetic field so it cannot be detected by conventional scientific measuring devices.
There is also the idea that dark matter emits sounds we can hear.
Along the walls of this particular science laboratory at intervals of every 15 feet or so, black-and-yellow warning tape marks the outlines of what appears to be potential doorways, rising to thigh level.
Two hooks hold a long-handled axe with a splitter blade above each taped outline.
Salt is an excellent substance in which to encase yourself if you want to study weakly interacting massive particles but it is also highly plastic and malleable.
Salt flows over time. It creeps around. It sags. If you cut a chamber out of a seam of halite with 3,000 feet of bedrock above it, that chamber will slowly distort.
The ceiling dips, the sides bulge. Gravity wants that space back.
Scientists working in these surroundings know it is a temporary situation; there are time constraints so they work quickly to conclude their research on deep time.
The young physicist Christopher Toth explains:
“Those are your emergency exits in case of a sudden slump in the halite,” explaining the safety protocols, then pointing to the doorways marked with warning tape, “here, here … and here. If the lab begins to collapse, you grab an axe, hack your way through the lab wall, and then hack your way out through the salt to safety.”
He pauses, smiles. “Well, that’s the theory, at least.”
Then the journalist interviewing him asks; “Is the search for dark matter an act of faith?”
“It is true that we dark-matter researchers have less proof compared to other scientists in terms of what we seek to discover and what we believe we know.
If there were a divinity then it would be utterly separate from both scientific enquiry and human longing.”
“No divinity in which I would wish to believe would declare itself by means of what we would recognize as evidence.”
He gestures at the data read-out. “If there is a god, we should not be able to find it.
If I detected proof of a deity, I would distrust that deity on the grounds that a god should be smarter than that.”
Yes, the search for dark matter is an act of faith all right.
It rests on the assumption our understanding of Newtonian physics and the laws of gravity are correct.
Or is dark matter an unknown force separate to that of gravity?
If the current scientific equations are correct, the next leap of faith is determining whether scientists are able to detect dark matter or not.